Welbeck set to shout about Silent Daughter

Welbeck fiction publisher Jon Elek has nabbed Scottish writer Emma Christie's Edinburgh-set début suspense novel about deep-held family secrets. Elek bought UK & Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Caroline Hardman at Hardman & Swainson to Christie's The Silent Daughter. 

The book follows a father, Chris, as he tries to make contact his adult daughter after her mother has been seriously hurt in a mysterious running accident and lies in a coma. As he gets increasingly frustrated by Ruth’s lack of response and her brother Mikey’s evasiveness, police investigations into his wife’s fall force him to answer some challenging questions: Why wasn’t May on the race route when she fell? Was she running after someone, or running from them? And then a "few uncomfortable certainties" begin to emerge...

Elek said that Christie's book "wrong-footed me at several places, and I just didn’t see the twist coming. It has one of those endings that make you want to tell someone immediately. Just at a point when you thought there wasn’t many places a writer could take you in psychological suspense, someone comes along and shows you there’s still an unmapped lake of darkness out there."

Christie was born and raised in Scotland but has spent much of her adult life living in Spain and Latin America. She spent five years as a news journalist at Aberdeen and Inverness' The Press and Journal, covering crime and political stories before becoming chief reporter. She now works as a tour guide and lecturer in history, culture and politics, with a US travel company.